Best I Ever Saw: Jordy And Zeke At Snapper
There’s a man standing next to me on the deck of the Rainbow Bay Surf Club Bar, and he is yelling. That’s not quite accurate, actually. People who live in bushes yell. Basketball players landing on their ankles wrong after a dunk yell. Lifeguards spotting a dorsal fin yell. This man is not yelling. This man is like a car stereo being turned on after the last driver left it on its loudest setting and is shaking the wood around us and making all the cutlery hum.
It is March, 2017, and it is the second day of the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast and all of Queensland, is hot and humid to the point that sucking down beers seems like the safest and only way to avoid getting boiled alive by the thick hot air. So that's what I'm doing. Zeke Lau is running up the beach below. His heat against Jordy Smith is next. The man next to me needs Zeke to understand that he will, "Get fucked." The man's tone does not suggest he "thinks" or "believes" Zeke will get fucked. To say otherwise would imply that there is an alternative to Jordy not winning this heat, and that may be impossible for this man to comprehend. It's, “Get fucked Zeke!” and, “Fuck off Zeke!” and, “Go! Jordy!… GO!” and not much else. I figure that, well, if he’s as animated as he is despite having no media, WSL, or sponsor wristbands on while I have somehow pilfered all three, the least I can do is slide my chair away from the air-con for a moment just to catch all the action out front. So that’s what I do.
Funny thing about WSL contests is that the quality of the surfing is often quite good. Like, really good. Stuff’s that certainly more impressive than anything you or I have done with a bit of fiberglass. It’s just, unless you're there, watching from the beach, the presentation of it all is, well, bad. Why is this? The answer is most probably: a few years back the WSL pitched some semi-decent ideas to an ad agency and the ad agency picked the absolute worst one because it's an ad agency. Every broadcast screams of 'eleven 40-plus-year-olds thought an NFL concept would work because it works for the NFL, so why can't it work for surfing?' But it isn't work, at all. Which is why we’re always either going off about it. And that’s a shame because it shouldn’t be the massive bummer it is. Getting to hang around on the beach all day because you refuse to have any real responsibilities is cool. Good surfing is cool. Put that all together and it should be exceptionally cool, yet, it isn’t. But anyway, I’m getting off-track. Back to Jordy and Zeke.
There’s something mesmerizing about someone turning their board at such a fast speed that you can hear it. It’s like when a train blows by you and you catch that metallic sound of the carriage cutting into the air around it as you stand frozen on the platform. Zeke’s turn just after the 19 minute mark in this is just that. The beach, the judges’ tower, the patrons of the Rainbow Bay Surf Club: we all could hear it. And I’m sure you can make a pretty good impression of it in your head right now. And it comes just a moment after he shoots out of a full cover that dredges the sand out beneath it. Any other day that’s a heat winner. Today it’s just his first real wave. And he needed it. Jordy had a cover-up, to casual superman, to another barrel on the wave before.
It’s back-to-back performance rights for Zeke and Jordy soon after. Both filled with those frontside wraps that all the tour guys can do but only Hawaiians and really tall South Africans actually look good doing. Filler content, but, still entertaining.
Then the sun starts dipping beneath the horizon and the water turns a deep emerald and we’re a little over halfway through things. That’s when Zeke spots it: one swinging wide off the rocks. Jordy’s too deep, so, it’s either take this or take a number for Zeke so he turns around, paddles, and it’s one, two, five full seconds in the barrel. He comes flying out with his arm in the air and a grin on his face because he knows he’s gone and bloody done it now, hasn’t he? And for one lull, he has. But then the set comes, and Jordy’s in the right spot now. There are only two minutes left, so this is his last wave. He needs an eight or a nine or an eight point nine, something ridiculous like that. He slides under another shelf that just about stretches all the way to Greenmount. It's a barrel-of-a-lifetime number two of the heat for Jordy. He shoots out. Big round-house, fist pump, and another big round-house for the fans and now it's over.
I go to leave because I realize I have actual work to go do even though I’m drunk which is not good because I am not Hunter S. Thompson and realize the shouting man is gone. I didn’t even notice him walk out. Twenty-five whole minutes pure, dedicated, surf-watching. And some of the best surfing I’ve ever watched.
Anyway, I just came across the video of it all. The result of being stuck inside like the rest of the world with not much else to do other than read books and get lost in internet wormholes. So, what’s the moral of all this? I don’t know. There is no moral. Good surfing makes for good viewing and it’s nice to have those sorts of things in times like that. And I’m sure there’ll be more unexpected radness like this once we’re over everything. I can’t believe I’m watching old WSL heats. They need to make surfing not illegal again…—James Royce
